Such fruit graders are known and for example the reader can refer to Australian patents 279301 Fairlie, 281144 Faringdon and the application 45270/72 Rowland and Rowland. The advantage of grading fruit with such a grader is that the fruit is less subject to damage than some other types of graders, and therefore such a grader is suitable for soft fruits such as apricots, peaches or strawberries.
Heretofore, however, fruit which has been released from belts has been dropped onto some hard surface for example a chute which is sloping towards a discharge position, and further handling has been required after grading.
This problem has been identified, and an effort has been made to overcome it by dropping longitudinally moving fruit onto a transversely moving flat conveyor belt of resilient foam, but further difficulties have been encountered, firstly in that the fruit tends to bounce on the foam as its direction of travel changes, and secondly in that foam is difficult to clean when partly dried fruit juice has penetrated the foam cells.